8.2: De Kehre

 Two days later, and there has still been no sign of Masongill. Unlike breakfast, which the Chairman organises, evening meals in the Potting Shed are left up to everyone individually to prepare as they like in the large shared kitchen, a bit like self service in a youth hostel. Lottie, pTravis and Masongill have fallen into the habit of cooking together though Masongill seems to do more than is strictly his fair share. So pTravis has said he will do it this evening, a bit later than the main rush.

When he arrives, he finds Lottie, alone, sitting at an empty table struggling with a book.

“What’s that?”

“Mind and World by John McDowell. I hate it. Or rather, I don’t understand a word of it.”

“Why are you reading it?”

“Well, I thought about whether, if one of the trees fell down and in the wood and we hadn’t seen and heard it, that it made sense to say it made a sound or whether sounds are just our experiences.”

“You’re still thinking about that tree?”

“Anyway, I mentioned this to Hipparchus and he started to waffle on about the difference between empirical idealism, transcendental idealism and linguistic idealism. The next thing I knew he was talking about the ‘unboundedness of the conceptual’ and this chap John McDowell and the ‘partial re-enchantment of nature’. Something about how the world itself fits our language and concepts. It seemed both spooky but significant but also somehow right.

“Ah: Max Weber on the disenchantment of the contemporary world-view. Outside the Potting Shed, though. In the town, perhaps. Or a city. Here I don’t think we feel the world is disenchanted. Anything but. The Poet has one on this.”

pTravis pops next door and returns with one of the books from the shelves. He reads out: “The fate of our times (After Max Weber) by Mike Farren.”

The fate of our times (After Max Weber)

“Waxing gibbous in the Windhill winter sky”
No.
We must perforce from poetry abstain.
The Shipley clock tower measures out our temporal map.
In units unified by railway lines
Which hurry us to catch the Bingley train,
Losing out on lingering in the Foxes Tap.

“An unseen moon drags tonnes of water from their rest!”
You ok mate? Too much post-work drinking, with your team?
One pub’s Betfred box is fixed, but you are nowhere done.
(As the pile of household bills at home attest?)
No time for dreaming: just get on, and on the beam!
It’s only Death that says life’s race is finally won.

“Raising my eyes to the night time sky…”
Watch your feet, mate: you’ve trodden in a turd!
And your curry’s mainly dribbling down your shirt!
While standing gormless, your last night-bus just went by.
Your metier’s a C-programming nerd.
Look down not up: enchantment gets you hurt

“That doesn’t sound like early Farren?”

“No. It is after ‘Die Kehre’. His ‘turn’. Lots of intellectuals have a turn. Here he is questioning the enchantment that Weber is nostalgic about by putting his own previous more romantic lines into a kind of questioning dialogue with someone who embodies Weber’s target mood.

“Not one of his better poems!”

“No. It almost sounds as though it were written by someone different. But such is Die Kehre. Mind you one of the reviews on the back mentions this particular poem and says:

‘This is a wonderfully grounded, razor-sharp response to romantic nature poetry. By placing Max Weber’s concept of Entzauberung (the “disenchantment of the world”) directly into the slushy, pint-soaked reality of a West Yorkshire night out, the poem captures a tensionthat feels both deeply specific and universal. The poem succeeds because it doesn’t just critique romantic poetry: it pities the need for it in an unromantic world. It presents the earlier Farren not as a foolish dreamer, but as a relatable human caught between the cosmic pulling of the moon and the pragmatic reality of fixing gambling machines in C.’”

“Pretty much what I thought, come to think of it.”